It's not a sure thing that you'll see a Microsoft Recovery partition. It depends how the install is done. My son's laptop came with Windows 8 pre-installed by the OEM on a GPT layout, so he's got the Microsoft Recovery partition, followed by the EFI partition, followed by the system partition (which I re-partitioned into two partitions for software and data), followed by the OEM recovery partition. And somewhere at the end of the disk is another copy of the partition table.
It's also possible to have the recovery tools as part of the system partition, rather than in a separate partition. But in that case, if your C:\ drive gets hosed you have to boot from a Windows 8 install media to use the recovery tools.
As for backing up: I moved from Partition Magic - there will never be better - to Norton Ghost after PM was acquired by Symantec. Ghost sucked footballs so I moved on to Acronis. That was fine for a while, until Acronis succumbed to feature creep rather than making its basic functionality work properly.
My next stop was ShadowProtect Desktop. Expensive, but it's industrial strength and totally reliable. The problem is, it's really aimed at the enterprise and servers. It lacks many features that matter to a home user - like waking the computer when it's time for a backup - and support sort of 'puts up' with home users. What killed it in the end for me is that it's really not ready for GPT.
I auditioned Macrium Reflect. It's okay but I'm not crazy about it. The interface isn't very intuitive (to me), it has an obscure file naming method, it can't collapse incrementals, it comes with scripting capabilities (in VBS and MS-DOS) for which I have no use, and it includes file backup but not in zip format. Plus, it's expensive for what you get.
Next up will be Paragon, which I think will be my choice. I really liked the program the last time I checked it out, but I was put off by the funky English translation by a recent Berlitz graduate, Now it has a U.S.-based user forum where Paragon reps participate in native English.